Acrobat Action to Find and Copy Files With Colored Text

Hello @Ken,

I hope you are doing well, and thank you for sharing all the details. We're sorry for the trouble you had.

++ adding to what our Adobe employee has shared above, and to answer your questions. Yes, Acrobat Pro Preflight can be narrowed to text objects for detection. Acrobat Preflight checks that can be customised to detect text that “isn’t plain black,” including text that uses black plus some amount of cyan, magenta, and yellow, and it notes that the check can be modified to flag text objects that use more than one colour. Also, the custom checks can combine properties from groups such as Page Description, object type, including whether an object is text, and Colours/Graphic State, colour spaces and fill/stroke colour values. So the “Object is not black” route is too broad, but a custom text-only check is the right direction. Please check this article for more detailed information: Additional checks in the Preflight tool (Acrobat Pro).

Suggested workflow: Please note that this may or may not work, depending on the current version of the app installed, or if you have any custom environment or restrictions.

1. Open one of the test PDFs in Acrobat Pro.

2. Go to All tools > Use print production > Preflight.

3. In the Preflight dialogue, go to the Profiles tab.

4. Either duplicate an existing profile or create a new one:

   • Options > Duplicate Profile, or

   • Options > Create Profile.

5. Edit the profile and unlock it if needed.

6. Under the profile, choose Custom checks.

7. Create or duplicate a check that combines:

   • a Page Description property that limits the result to text objects, and

   • a Colors / Graphic State property that flags non-black / multi-color / RGB / CMYK color use.

8. For 4-color black text, the useful logic is essentially:

   • object type = text, and

   • text uses more than one process color, or black plus nonzero C/M/Y.

9. For RGB text, use the same text-object filter, but target RGB/color-space properties instead.

10. Run the profile with Analyze first, not Analyze and Fix, so you can confirm that only the intended text objects are being reported.

For visual verification, you can also use All tools > Use print production > Output preview. In Output Preview, Acrobat lets you view colors by source space and specific element types such as text, and its Color Warnings > Rich Black option can help identify rich black usage before output. That’s useful for spot-checking, although Preflight is the better option for batch detection.

Copying only the affected PDFs

For your batch workflow, use the text-only Preflight profile in a droplet or Action:

1. Go to All tools > Use print production > Preflight.

2. Choose Options > Create Droplet.

3. Select your text-colour Preflight profile.

4. In the droplet/action handling options, choose Copy PDF File and send problem files to the Error folder.

5. Run the droplet/action on your batch.

Fixing the files

For fixing, I’d be more cautious. Adobe documents that Preflight fixups permanently change the PDF, and that color-conversion operations can change color values in the document. Acrobat’s Convert Colors tool can target all colors or colors for specified object types, and it includes matching criteria such as Object Type, Color Type, and Text Size. So a text-scoped color conversion is the safer approach than running a broad all-object fixup. [https://adobe.ly/4fDAP3z], [https://adobe.ly/4fDAP3z]

In practice, I’d keep your two-pass workflow unless you have fully tested the profile on representative files:

1. Pass 1: Text-only Preflight check → copy suspect PDFs to a review folder.

2. Review the Preflight results or report.

3. Pass 2: Apply a tested text-scoped conversion/fixup only to the reviewed files.

If the predefined fixup you are using does not expose an object-type/text-only matching criterion, I would not use it as an all-in-one automatic fix for this job, because it may also affect non-text objects.

Since your PDFs are mostly coming from InDesign, this should work where the text remains real PDF text. But if the source PDF has been flattened, outlined, or rasterized, Acrobat may no longer see that content as text.

Also, let us know how it goes, and if the issue still persists, please share a sample PDF file through which you are able to reproduce, the source file, the current version of Acrobat, and InDesign so that we can test it at our end.

Regards,

Anand Sri.